Goodfellas’ Joe Pesci won an Oscar for his Spider-squashing portrayal of a nutso mobster but when it comes to wiping people out he pales next to his forerunner, the similarly dwarfish Cagney. Good grief, the insane Cagney is a one-man army of death.

Witness for the Prosecution is a Billy Wilder classic based on the novel by Agatha Christie. There are many great courtroom drama movies, like 12 Angry Men, with plot surprises, turns and twists, but there is no other movie like this one for a shocking and unexpected conclusion. This film is one of the very best.…

Few among you are likely to watch a Japanese film that doesn’t feature either copious amounts of kung fu or a large, fire-breathing lizard, but…

Directed by David Lean. Screenplay by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan &Ronald Neame Based on the 1861 novel by Charles Dickens. With: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Bernard Miles (who we’ll see ten years later as a kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much). Here, he is kindly blacksmith, Joe), Francis L. Sullivan as Mr. Jaggers…

Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass just might be the first Hollywood film to argue that virginity is the surest ticket to emotional instability